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Howard Nemerov The Vacuum Analysis

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He almost makes her appear on his stage of grief by revealing her facial expression when confronted with the now upside down house. Howard Nemerov’s “The Vacuum” is structured around a central pun, that of the vacuum. The speaker is an older widower, for whom there is a vacuum (meaning both the absence of matter as well as the appliance) where his wife once was. The vacuum itself is a metaphor alluring to the vacuum in the husbands' life that opened after she died. Without the company of his wife his "house is quiet now" (1). He has no one to talk to at home, and the vacuum cleaner, which to him is a remnant of his wife, "sulks in the corner closet" (2).In the third stanza, the poet wrote about the daily routine of the old man’s deceased wife.
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